Thirty years ago, Americans stood in shock watching unfold what had been
officially deemed by federal officials as "incredible"—a
major accident at a nuclear power reactor. Americans watched their fellow
citizens flee their homes and businesses in panic, watched as regulators
and utility employees tried to address the accident, watched and tried to
understand why poisonous radiation was being released into the atmosphere
when they had been told such an outcome was impossible. Thirty years after
Three Mile Island, 35 years since the NRC was formed to break up the perceived
nuclear industry influence of the Atomic Energy Commission, we find ourselves
having come full circle. Like the AEC before it, the NRC has become the captive
of the industry it was created to regulate. The system is broken, it must
be repaired.

You can hear a great radio program (Voices from Three Mile Island) first
aired on 65 public radio stations on TMI’s 1st anniversary, plus watch
the original CBS News with Walter Cronkite reporting on the accident, and
read March 24, 2009 Congressional testimony by Peter Bradford, who was an
NRC Commissioner during TMI, here.

People died – and are still dying – at Three Mile Island. As the thirtieth
anniversary approaches, we mourn the deaths that accompanied the biggest
string of lies ever told in US industrial history. The public was assured
there were no radiation releases. That quickly proved to be false. The public
was then told the releases were controlled and done purposely to alleviate
pressure on the core. Both those assertions were false. The public was told
the releases were "insignificant." But stack monitors were saturated
and unusable, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later told Congress it
did not know – and STILL does not know – how much radiation was released
at Three Mile Island, or where it went. Investigations by epidemiologist
Dr. Stephen Wing of the University of North Carolina, and others, led Wing
to warn that the official studies on the health impacts of the accident suffered
from “logical and methodological problems.” Studies by Wing and
by Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry official, announced this week
at Harrisburg, significantly challenge official pronouncements on both radiation
releases and health impacts.